Sourdough

The deal, she said, was this: Three minutes with the panel. Offer a taste; just a taste. Explain what makes you different. Be eloquent but concise but confident but deferential. Much of this is beyond your control; if you make pickles but the markets are overflowing with them, it won’t matter how great your pickles are.

For all his reality-bending intensity, our CEO was accessible and approachable. He ate his lunch in the cafeteria with the rest of us, sitting with a different group every day. You could tell where he was without looking because Andrei’s table always laughed a little too loud.

Beoreg returned a moment later dragging an enormous wooden trunk, scarred and stickered, something from another era of travel. He unhooked its clasps and threw back the lid; inside, arrayed in a jumble, were all the accoutrements of a kitchen. There were small long-handled cups and broad, flat pans. I saw a thick clutch of wooden spoons, their edge

We passed a shelf where a wheel of cheese had exploded into some kind of fungal overgrowth. Tall, mushroom-like fruiting bodies rose up and swayed slightly in the air disturbed by our passage. I sucked in a sharp breath. “Is that . . . there . . .” I pointed. “Is that all right?” Agrippa nodded. “Oh, it’s fantastic. An empire is rising, lifting up

I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice—and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.

Here in Edinburgh, in the little Mazg neighborhood, when I go walking in the morning, through all the second-story windows I can hear the starters singing.

Gracie tipped the jar toward me. “Try some, baker.” The gesture was solicitous, but her eyes glinted challenge. In every legend of the underworld, there is the same warning: Don’t eat the food. Not before you know what’s happening and/or what bargain you’re accepting. Along the length of the table, wide dishes bobbed up and down, orbiting on curren

“Everything’s radioactive. It’s fine. Mutation’s a good thing.” I had no idea if he was serious or not. He seemed like the kind of person who cultivated that ambiguity—who reveled in it. Generally I don’t enjoy those kinds of people.

In a panic, I threw together a batch of the flour-water starter food. It felt like I ought to drip it in slowly, just a bit at a time, as if I were bottle-feeding an ailing kitten. (I have never bottle-fed an ailing kitten.) (I did once coax Kubrick back to life with a spray bottle.) (You have to work pretty hard to push a cactus to the brink of de